11–20 of 95 posts
* don't constantly push to have your employees stay late
* if you need your employees to travel, while they're away don't pressure them to work more than their usual work day.
* don't disrespect and be a jerk to your employees
* provide reasonable sick and vacation benefits
if something causes the bay area monopoly on startups to weaken in the near term, I expect it to be around retention challenges or costs. We have a fundamental problem in Silicon Valley: there are not enough places for people to live in. This manifests itself in many ways (higher rent, higher salaries, higher turnover, etc) and is probably going to be a hard limit on how big the local tech industry can get. It's a ce…
We have a fundamental problem in Silicon Valley: there are not enough places for people to live in. Transportation is your problem, along with NIMBY regulations (fought-for by limousine liberal hypocrites) that prevent proper growth. Silicon Valley is not Manhattan, with its daytime population density of 170k per square mile. It should not be expensive and congested. It's just badly planned, with a lot of regulatory…
This guy might be a VC that I can actually like. His point on terrible equity allocations is spot-on. If you're giving a dime and a half (0.15%) to your first employee engineer, at a valuation of $5 million, you're not going to get someone good. If you account for equity at-valuation, bad people become cheaper if you're a startup but good people become more expensive (i.e. you'd have to offer $75k per year of equity…
if something causes the bay area monopoly on startups to weaken in the near term, I expect it to be around retention challenges or costs. We have a fundamental problem in Silicon Valley: there are not enough places for people to live in. This manifests itself in many ways (higher rent, higher salaries, higher turnover, etc) and is probably going to be a hard limit on how big the local tech industry can get. It's a ce…
Many of your young, hip engineers will want more room and a family-friendly lifestyle in ten years.
And if you're going to allow extensive work-from-home, how do you keep from diluting the benefits of your Silicon Valley location?
Mobile Hacker? Come work with the team that's reinventing farming
SimplyInsured (YC W13) Is Hiring Hackers - Change Healthcare Forever
Homejoy is hiring hackers to change the home services industry
I guess the only way to get smart people to work 60 Hrs a week for low pay is to convince them they are changing the world somehow.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. It wouldn't hurt for SV to allow some focus on fixing local issues. Housing being the most important problem in my opinion.
Why oh why aren't more companies returning to the South Bay, specifically San Jose? Downtown SJ is tiny compared to San Francisco's. And there are plenty of tracts for office parks in the suburbs. Sure, all of the hip young hackers want someplace cool to go to, but it's only an hour away to the north.
I.e., it will be equity that attracts mercenaries looking for a quick exit, and good salaries that will ensure long term loyalty.
When I talk to ex-coworkers, the reasons they often cite for leaving are: 1) weren't empowered to achieve their career goals 2) weren't compensated relative to the value they felt they brought 3) worked on too many failed products and 4) burned out.
Honestly, which company has a mission that motivates employees to stay despite lower pay and negligible equity? Khan Academy has a mission, the rest of SV is nonsense hoping to get lucky.
You don't want to "hire good employees" but you want to "create a great team". If an employee feels like he's part of a team where he can create more value than he could someplace else, it makes sense for him to stay. If he feel s like the team is holding him back, he ought to leave in a heartbeat.
It's said that "employees don't leave a company, they leave managers", and this is definitely true. One bad manager can cause employee retention problems that go on for years.